Return to Grace

4

HANNAH WAKENED TO THE MUTED THUD-THUD of Mamm’s hand-operated pressing machine that put the creases in the stiff, white prayer kapps she made in the old sunroom at the rear of the house, a familiar sound that always carried up the back wall. She opened her eyes, then closed them again. It was bad enough to have to look at the wrapped gauze and taped bandage on her left wrist and the array of pills on the bedside table but worse to feel she was in a time warp. Except for moving her twin bed to the guest room and storing some wedding supplies here, Naomi hadn’t changed much of their shared back-corner bedroom after Hannah had left.

From the top of the familiar maple dresser, Hannah’s bonneted childhood doll seemed to stare at her for all the things she’d done wrong, despite being eyeless and faceless. Strange to have the feeling she was being watched in this private, second-story bedroom in the middle of open fields.

Despite her pain pills, she hadn’t slept well because she’d heard some sort of unfamiliar flapping, like bird wings, from time to time. Maybe it was a loose shingle on the roof in the brisk wind that had now calmed a bit. If Seth was working up on the roof today, she hoped he’d be careful. Amish men didn’t use safety harnesses, for whatever happened was God’s will, one thing she’d learned to question during her days in the world. After all, sometimes people’s injuries were their own stupid fault.

But one huge change in this spot of her happy childhood and rumspringa years were the signs of Naomi’s coming wedding adorning the room: a treadle sewing machine with a nearly completed, sky-blue wedding dress, bolts of burgundy material for her four attendants’ dresses, boxes of favors and inscribed napkins stacked in the corner by the closet. The talk at supper last night had been all about the Esh-Troyer marriage. Well, of course, Hannah could see why. It wasn’t just to avoid talking about the mess she’d made of her life. Amish weddings were planned and prepared quickly after the announcement in church of the betrothal. With so many invited, lots of people pitched in, preparing to feed nearly four hundred guests at a wedding feast with a traditional, home-cooked meal.

In the emotion of her reunion with Naomi yesterday—Hannah knew her younger sister had looked up to her just as she had to her older, now-married sisters, Ida and Ruth—she had promised not only to attend the wedding but to help with it. Nothing like facing the entire Amish community she’d let down. At least she had until a week from today to prepare herself for that.

Hannah groaned, sat up carefully and gasped to see a small, round face staring up at her over the side of the bed. So that’s why she felt she was being watched. It was a darling little Amish doll—a living one, with a pert mouth and wide, azure eyes.

“Where Naomi?” the child asked in their German dialect. Then Hannah knew who it was. Not the niece whose birth she’d missed while she was gone, but Seth and Lena’s little daughter, Marlena, now around two and a half years old.

“I’m Hannah,” she told the child, and her voice broke. Like an idiot, she blinked back tears. The little girl resembled Seth more than Lena. “I—I can help you find Naomi.”

“Daadi go up,” Marlena said, pointing at the ceiling or, more likely, the roof since Seth was reroofing the house, though she hadn’t heard one hammer or nail when it must be midmorning. “Mamm go up, too,” Marlena added.

“Oh, there you are!” Naomi cried, rushing into the room and scooping up the child. “She was playing in the hall when I went to use the bathroom.”

“Naomi,” Hannah said as she swung her feet carefully to the floor, “you do not have to move out of your room for me, especially not with all you have going on here.”

“It was our room for years and still is!” Naomi insisted. “And now it can be yours, because after next Thursday, we’ll be living with Josh’s folks for a while. I’m fine in Ida and Ruth’s old room.”

“Daadi go up,” Marlena said again, pointing. “Up to the sky.” The child squirmed to be put down, toddled to the back window facing the barn and craned her neck to peer skyward.

“I’ll have to tell Seth you’re up, and he can pound away on the new shingles now,” Naomi said. “He didn’t want to wake you, so he’s helping Daad stack firewood. As for this little one, she thinks her daadi goes up on the roof looking for her mamm, who is in heaven.”

“Oh, that’s what she meant. But Seth or anyone else does not have to work around me.”

“You know it’s our way, whether you’re a guest or family, and you’re both,” Naomi said with a nod. Taking Marlena’s hand, she started from the room. “Oh,” she said, turning back, “someone else is waiting for you to get up. Special Agent Armstrong will be here right after noon meal to take you to the graveyard to walk through … through what happened. Sorry, but that’s what he said when he came by earlier. Give me a shout if you need help getting dressed,” she added, and pointed toward the chair in front of the sewing machine as they left the room.

Hannah gasped. Now she saw why Naomi’s wedding dress was only partly done. It was not just because they were letting Hannah sleep in this morning. She saw, laid out over the chair back and arranged on its seat, a new Amish dress in emerald-green, a good color for a maidal; black undergarments, no bra of course, which would take some getting used to again; a new pair of white, laced walking shoes like the women wore; a new cape—no, it was one of her old ones—and a new black bonnet. But no prayer kapp for her red-dyed, short-cut head, the sign of a dedicated Amish woman. All this kindness and generosity—but the lack of that precious kapp—spoke louder than Naomi’s words.

Tears blurring her vision, Hannah walked slowly to the small oval mirror they kept turned to the wall unless it was absolutely needed. After all, it was prideful to preen and to change the appearance God gave to each of His children. The true reason photographs of Amish faces were forbidden was that it could lead to individualism and conceit in one’s appearance, even though it also defied the Biblical warning “Thou shalt make no graven images.”

Hannah turned the mirror outward and jolted as her image stared back. Scarlet hair, though it now lay flat and looked softer after Mamm had washed and brushed it in the hospital. A face plain and naked without the dramatic mascara and black lipstick. Just Hannah Esh’s Amish face again, only one now lined with pain, perhaps fear, eyes narrowed, full lips pressed together, and the lower one trembling. She realized she was shaking all over and not just because she’d risen from a warm bed.

Was she scared to be home? Afraid of having to face everyone, especially Seth, again?

She thrust out her lower lip in defiance and walked to the clothing. One-handed, she reached for it to get dressed. It was only then she noticed that the screen to the side window behind the sewing machine was cleanly slit along its edge. Maybe that was what she’d heard flapping last night. But it was so unlike her daad to leave something not repaired. She leaned closer and gasped. Long, dark marks on the sill inside of the screen made it look like some sharp object had tried to pry the window itself open.

“You didn’t lean a ladder at the driveway side of the house, even to carry the shingles up, did you?” Bishop Esh asked Seth as he sat at the far end of the dinner table from Hannah, with Marlena in a high chair beside him. Seth was pleased to see Hannah at the table and dressed Amish, though she hadn’t covered her head. As ever, she seemed for him some sort of magnet and he the compass needle pulled to her true north.

He had to focus on the bishop’s words. “No,” Seth answered. “I’ve kept the ladder between the flower beds in back, near where the shingles were unloaded. Since the peak of the roof is on the driveway side, my ladder wouldn’t reach it. Is there a problem?”

“Yes, one we will have to run by Agent Armstrong, that’s for sure,” the bishop said, frowning.

Naomi, sitting on the other side of Marlena’s high chair, put in, “Someone cut the screen in the side window to my bedroom—now Hannah’s—and it wasn’t my Josh, that’s sure. He wouldn’t do that, even if the ladder marks were under the cut window. And someone tried to pry it open, too, but it sure wasn’t Josh and me!”

“We know that, Naomi,” Mrs. Esh said, and reached over to pat her youngest daughter’s hand. “You’ve always done things on the straight and narrow, ya, we know that.”

Seth saw Hannah’s cheeks color, as if that was a reflection on her, maybe on him, as well. Sure, Hannah used to slip out to meet him once in a while after the house went dark but not through a sliced window screen. Hannah and her friend Sarah, next farm over, had sneaked out in their rumspringa years to listen to the radio and fool around. But this news upset him, and not because he’d been indirectly asked if that ladder and the cut screen was his doing. If it wasn’t him, who was it? Could Josh have done it and not told Naomi? Once Linc Armstrong found out about it, he’d probably question anyone within miles who had a ladder.

“Could someone have been trying to break in?” Seth asked, his fork halfway to his mouth. He hadn’t so much as tasted the chicken on biscuits yet, since he’d been making sure Marlena ate well.

“Naomi’s sure the window wasn’t that way yesterday,” the bishop said. “It could be those nosy reporters with their cameras, not taking no for an answer.”

Or it could be something worse, Seth almost said. That thought hung in the air while people went back to eating. Finally, Hannah spoke.

“I don’t want Agent Armstrong trampling all over my private life, but he’s going to have to take a look at the window and the ladder marks.”

“Right,” Seth put in. “One more thing. He asked me to go with you to the graveyard this afternoon. Not to hear what you tell him, but to pick up the story where I came in. To talk to us about the crime scene.”

He said no more and tucked into Mrs. Esh’s delicious dinner, though he hardly felt hungry anymore. He’d bet a new barn that part of the reason Agent Armstrong wanted him to go along was so that he could see how he and Hannah would act when they were together. Actually, he’d like to see how they would, too.

Hannah noted how tense Seth and Agent Armstrong were around each other as they stood under her bedroom window after dinner.

“Those imprints look identical to your ladder’s feet, Seth,” Armstrong observed as he rose from a squat after a close examination of the imprinted soil between the bare rose canes. He’d already taken photos of the feet of the ladder, the cut screen and the scratches he called “jimmy marks” on the bedroom windowsill upstairs.

Hannah hugged her cloak tighter around herself with her good arm as she, Seth, Naomi and Daad watched the agent’s every move. His eyes had seemed to take in everything inside and outside the Esh home, just like he tried to see inside people’s heads.

“Of course,” Agent Armstrong added, “whoever it was could easily have borrowed your roofing ladder, though I don’t see any footprints back there but yours.”

Hannah watched as the two very different men looked at each other, eye-to-eye. Neither blinked or flinched.

“It’s the why that will lead us to the who,” Seth said.

“Lead us? But I get your drift. Motive. Easier said than done, but I’ll get to the bottom of it,” Armstrong countered.

“But what I don’t like,” Seth went on, “and what you didn’t mention is that if someone was trying to get to Hannah, he had to know what bedroom she was in, had to be some sort of insider. Bishop Esh and I checked, though I don’t think you did, to be sure no other windows in the house had a random cut screen or screwdriver marks.”

“Who said it was a screwdriver?”

“I— We, especially her family, just want Hannah protected,” Seth insisted.

Bishop Esh put his shoulder between the two men to make them step farther apart. “I’m going to buggy into the hardware store in town,” he told them, “get a new screen and bolts for both Hannah’s windows and extra ones for the windows and doors downstairs. Hannah told her mother in the hospital that she could not think of anyone who was her enemy, but I know Agent Armstrong has considered that, too, Seth.”

“Daad,” Hannah put in, “I’m sorry to cause so much trouble again for y—”

“Ya, you have, my girl!” he said, frowning at first before he cleared his throat. Hannah jolted at his tone. Since she’d been back, she’d seen Daad had a bee in his bonnet over her leaving and defying him. Maybe he still resented the way her hair looked. She’d tried to just ignore and smooth over the tension between them. After all, she could hardly blame him after what she’d put him, as her father and as bishop, through. “Just be grateful,” he went on in a calmer voice, “you are where you should be now, that’s for sure.” He shot a side glance at Seth she could not read. “You two go on now, help Agent Armstrong.”

Though Hannah could tell Seth didn’t want to get in the black car Agent Armstrong drove, she got in the backseat when he opened the door for her. “Watch your head,” he told her, and put a hand on her hair, then leaned over her to fasten her seat belt, evidently so she wouldn’t have to do it one-handed. She smelled a tart pine scent on him, and his hand touched her hip hard through her cape and skirt as he clicked the belt closed.

“You want to ride shotgun, Seth?” he asked. “You know, up front?”

“I’ll ride with Hannah,” he said, and walked around to sit next to her in the rear seat behind the cagelike divider that separated the front seats from the back. It was, she thought, a wide seat. Agent Armstrong was across the screen, but Seth seemed so far away from her.

“Listen,” Armstrong said as he drove slowly out of the Esh driveway past clothes blowing on the line in the brisk November day, “I’ve been calling both of you by your first names, so I’d appreciate it if you’d just call me Linc. My dad named me Lincoln for our Civil War president, Honest Abe, and that’s my motto—straight talk, full disclosure. I expect that from both of you. We’re working together on this, okay?”

“Fine,” Hannah said only. She did want to help in any way she could, including getting along with this man. She looked at Seth’s frowning profile.

“Fine with me,” Seth muttered. “You going to make straight talk a policy with everyone you question, such as Josh Troyer, about whether he used my ladder last night?”

Hannah saw Armstrong’s eyes dart toward Seth in the rearview mirror. “One step ahead of me, Seth. No, not with everyone, just key witnesses, and I don’t figure Naomi’s fiancé is one, but I’ve looked into him, too. The Troyers are a wealthy family, aren’t they, with owning the big grain elevator and that historic grist mill? Since they offer tours of the mill, I’m not sure if they’d think publicity of a murder around here would be good or bad for business.”

Hannah and Seth exchanged lightning-quick glances. This man was suspicious of everyone and considered every angle. If he thought Josh or the Troyers could be involved, anyone could be on his list.

Neither Seth nor Hannah responded. Linc Armstrong’s sharp eyes—like those of the eagle on his badge, she thought—glanced at them in the rearview mirror now and then. Could her feeling of being watched just be a reaction to his FBI surveillance and suspicious nature, no matter how friendly he seemed on the surface? She felt so torn about him, both guarded yet grateful.

When he pulled the car to a stop, almost exactly where her friends had parked at the graveyard on Halloween night, Linc said, “Seth, I’ll ask you to stay put until I’ve had Hannah walk me through things, then I’ll have you approach and enter the grounds just as you did that night.”

If “stay put” meant stay in the car, Seth ignored that order. He got out and stood near the fence, festooned with fluttering yellow plastic tape with the big, black words repeated over and over: Police Crime Scene Do Not Enter Police Crime Scene Do Not Enter … It was a good thing, she thought, that no one in the church had died right now. Her thoughts went to Kevin and Tiffany, to her other worldly friends who had not been hit by bullets that night. She wanted to write letters to their families. She couldn’t call, because Linc had confiscated her phone for now; a phone she’d need to give up, if she stayed here….

Feeling Seth’s gaze burning into her back from where he stood at the fence, she ducked under the tape Linc lifted for her, and they went into the graveyard.

“I’m sorry I didn’t get here sooner,” Jack told Ray-Lynn as he pulled her into the inside back entry to the restaurant, despite the fact she’d just seated a party of six during the lunch rush. “I ran into complications.”

“I guess you did. If she’s come back to haunt you, she missed Halloween.”

“I didn’t mean her. Something about the graveyard case with Agent Armstrong. Ray-Lynn, why didn’t you answer your phone last night after you drove away? Or come to the door of your house when I knocked on it? Considering how you ran out, I didn’t want to just use my key—which I’d left at my house, anyway.”

“Where did she stay last night?”

“Not with me. I got her settled in at Amanda Stutzman’s B and B.”

“Oh, great! Just great. So she’s living within walking distance of my house! You told me once she worked as a hostess in this restaurant. Don’t you dare ask me to give her a job here, I don’t care if you do own fifty percent of it now! You said she used her salary to help pay for your house and the decor, so I supposed you’re thinking she still owns half of that. When she took off, you never paid her back because she didn’t want your money, right? Bet she thinks that house is still half hers and you’re all hers, because it kind of looked that way last night!”

“Would you calm down? I’ll work it out. I just didn’t want you to be upset.”

“I’m not upset. I’m way beyond that.”

“I want us to talk this out, but I’ve got obligations right now, you know that, and you’ve always understood that. You gotta trust me on this.”

“I do—to help solve the graveyard shootings. The other …” She shrugged and fought to keep from bursting into tears. “I’ve got people waiting, Jack, and you do, too. Duty calls, as they say. Does she—does she intend to stay?”

He shrugged, then nodded. “So she says. Got fed up with a shallow life in Vegas, she said, and—”

“Las Vegas? She’s been in Las Vegas and now wants to come back to Homestead, Ohio, in Amish country? Jack, she may look like a million bucks, but she’s probably just broke or running from something!”

“From mistakes, she says.”

“Did you tell her about us?”

“Of course I did. Told her not to apply for a job here or even to come in, but she said it’s a free country.”

Ray-Lynn slapped the extra menus she still held to her chest down on the pile of cartons. “You can’t handle her, can you? But you want to, don’t you—handle her, real up close and personal? You never got over her, did you?”

“Damn it, Ray-Lynn, just give me some time!”

“Oh, I will. Lots. Now, I’ve got a restaurant to run and a life to live, so excuse me,” she said, and grabbed the menus. She darted past him back into the restaurant proper, put the stack of menus by the cash register and went into the ladies’ room, the two stalls of which were blessedly empty.

With stiff arms, she steadied herself against the washbasin, afraid to look at herself in the mirror. She wanted to throw things, to break the mirror, just shatter it and scream. But she ran cold water and dabbed it under her eyes, then went back out and stood near the front door with a smile pasted on her face. The sign over the front door, the one she’d been so proud of, that her very own Amish artist, Sarah Kauffman, had painted so beautifully, really riled her now: Southern Hospitality and Amish Cooking—Y’all Come Back, Danki.

No way in all of God’s creation could she be glad Lily Freeman had come back.

5

“IS THIS PRETTY MUCH THE PATH THE FIVE OF you took that night?” Linc asked as they walked from the gate up the hill into the heart of the graveyard.

“Yes,” Hannah told him. “I don’t think we walked in single file, though.”

“I believe these are your grandparents buried here,” he said, indicating two of the many identical stones laid out in neat rows.

“Yes. You have cased the place, as they say,” she said, trying to keep her voice steady. Again, it amazed her how much background work this man had done into her life. Did he think she was somehow the key to what had happened? Surely no one had meant to shoot her that night, but she couldn’t accept that someone had been after the others, either. It must have been a random act—except for that slit screen. And was the policeman assigned to guard her hospital room just to keep reporters away? Daad had fended the media off, so was the policeman to protect her from someone else?

Linc interrupted her agonizing. “Forensic specialists have gone extensively over this site and that upland woodlot where the shooter stood. So that night you had your friends put down the blanket, the boom box, the food and wine on Lena Lantz’s grave, right?”

“No! No, I wouldn’t do that. As you said, you shouldn’t construe things. That was just chance that Kevin and Mike stopped at her grave, because they knew nothing about Lena or Seth, either. I obviously hadn’t been here for her burial, so I was upset when I saw we were near her tombstone. I wanted them to move away, but I didn’t want to have to explain why, so I didn’t say anything.”

Studying her as she spoke, he nodded. She gasped as they reached Lena’s grave. Not only was the tombstone a mess but white paint outlined the shape of Kevin’s body on the grass. She noted he had fallen sideways over the lower part of Lena’s grave. Nearby, small yellow circles were sprayed around what looked to be blood spots.

“Tiffany’s blood and yours,” he said. “We had it tested. You’re type AB, if you ever need to know.”

Linc firmly took the elbow of her good arm to steady her. Each time he touched her, even briefly—but especially when he assessed her with that hard stare—she felt heat. No one but Seth had ever affected her that way.

Hannah took a good look at what was left of Lena’s tombstone, which, they’d said, had kept her from sustaining a much worse wound when the bullet ricocheted. The rectangular stone was deeply cracked, one corner shattered. One or more bullets had blasted away the word Lantz and her death date, so it read only Lena and her birth year.